Wanna-be mystic

Last week we went to a New Members Class at church, which was less a “class” and more a “getting to know you” between us (my husband and I and another new member of the church) and some of the longstanding members of the congregation (and by longstanding, I mean at least one person there was a fifth-generation member). Everyone was asked to share about themselves, answering a set of questions ranging from the mundane “What do you do during the day?” to “Where are you on your faith journey?”

The hardest question for me, and the reason that I was glad to go nearly last so that I had time to think, was “What about church are you passionate about?” Everyone else had such great, specific answers—they had ministries they really cared about, and people within the congregation that they cared about, their families, and so on. And so while I listened to their stories, I pondered what it was about church that I just had to be there for—what’s the image of church that my mind keeps coming back to again and again?

***

There was a period of time when I couldn’t shake the sense that God was purely fictional. But I never had that feeling about Jesus. I could concede that he wasn’t necessarily who I had been told he was, but he still felt Real.

Even long before that time, I was deeply jealous of the medieval mystics I studied who encountered Jesus in intimate visions—I would love to share a pot of tea with Julian of Norwich (she seems like a tea drinker) or wine with Margery Kempe (maybe coffee if it’s before lunch, since someone with fourteen children probably needs all the caffeine, but she doesn’t seem like a tea drinker to me at all) and talk to them about what they saw. From books like Eating Beauty by my former professor Ann Astell (whose book is just gorgeous and who would also be a lovely person to drink tea with), I realized how much of these female mystics’ connection with Jesus came through encounters with the Eucharist.

The convolutions that medieval theologians got themselves in to try to construct an iron-clad defense of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist was more silly/desperate than anything. But I try to give people the benefit of the doubt when they describe their experiences to me, even if those people have been dead for six or seven hundred years, and somehow these women (and many others of a mystic-bent, both male and female) did meet Jesus there.

When I first read these narratives of seeing visions of Jesus in the Host, or hearing his voice, or being denied by the priest, only to be served by Jesus himself, it was totally foreign to me, whose experience was limited to cracker chiclets and grape juice in plastic cups, informally passed up and down the rows in wide, shining plates (identical to the ones we had just used to collect offering) after a two-minute devotional. The lights were lowered and there was meditative music, and at some point it was moved from before the sermon to after. I think it was supposed to be less like service-filler and more like the climax, but for me, that just made it feel more like an afterthought. As far as I could tell, it was simply intended to be a weekly reminder of Jesus’s sacrifice.*

Later I was a member at a church where communion was still symbolic, but the weight of their practice was on “guarding the Lord’s table” against it being taken “unworthily.” This meant it was held infrequently and at odd times (almost never during the morning service), and so after nearly ten years there, I could count on one hand (and still have fingers to spare) the number of times we communed there.

In contrast, while the medieval church had also guarded the table even more fiercely, even those who only watched the mass without communing were expected to experience the presence of Jesus more intensely than I ever had.

During the Grail Quest, Sir Lancelot is struck down by a giant hand (or dwarf, thanks to Sir Thomas Malory’s fortuitous misreading of Old French) just for daring to cross the threshold of a chapel during the elevation of the Host. He then spends several weeks lost in visions. While ordinary non-Grail-Quest-knights were obviously not expected to see the Holy Trinity suspended over a priest’s head as a matter of course, this narrative demonstrates that Lancelot is blessed like other mystics who have had similar visions of the hidden spiritual reality of the ritual, not that he is insane.

***

The priest of the Episcopal church we attended in Lafayette for a few months before we moved, when inviting the congregation to participate in the Eucharist, told us that “we don’t know how it works! It just does.” Which sounds a lot like what Church Across The Street’s denomination says: “In this sacrament the crucified and risen Christ is Present, giving his true body and blood as food and drink. This real presence is a mystery.” 

When the Great Thanksgiving begins, I get a little thrill down my spine—like I should take off my shoes. Usually I just pull a kid in close and tell them to hush, look up front, and watch, because this is important.

I don’t always feel like I believe. But every Sunday as I stand or kneel and put a little wine-soaked wafer on my tongue, I still taste and see that the Lord is good, and he’s there.

* I did a quick Googling of the theology of communion in the Restoration Movement, which was where I grew up, to see if there was more conversation about it than I was aware of, and there was little discussion of the significance of communion beyond that it should be done weekly—I’m sure there is a rich theology behind that practice, but it was not foregrounded in my experience.

Kalamazoo ftw

So the problem with going to the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo this year was that I enjoyed it way too much. I like standing up in front of a room full of thoughtful, interested people and telling them about an idea I had, and then listening to other people tell me their interesting ideas, and then all of us discussing it together. Which sounds strange, coming from a 100% introvert like me, but really. And I felt like a for-real, legitimate scholar again, which is a feeling I haven’t had for a while and so was pretty exhilarating.

Of course, it helps that I spent most of my time at the Arthuriana booth hanging out with people who I only see once a year, at Kzoo. I actually only went to one panel—mine—and when I wasn’t at the booth, I was wandering the exhibit hall or watching the cygnets on the pond with B. He came to the exhibit hall too—his first word was “book!” and his first sentence was “read da book!” so naturally I had to show him around. I bought a couple books—one of them because as soon as I walked in, my best friend took me by the elbow and dragged me over to it and put it in my hands :-) and one because it’s by an author I’ve been wanting to read and seems to hit the sweet spot where my personal interests and my research interests intersect. I bought nothing because it was on some sort of obligatory reading list or bibliography.

I also bought myself a hot pink t-shirt with a dragon picking his teeth with a sword after finishing off a knight. “Sometimes the dragon wins.”

Traveling overnight by myself was fun—I realized after I got home that this had been the first time I’ve done that since college, and the first time ever that I’ve stayed in a hotel room without any other adults. Taking a trip with just me and B was peaceful and pleasant—he and I are pretty laid back and prefer to just entertain ourselves quietly when in the hotel room and take in the scenery when out and about, so we’re perfect travel companions. Even if he does kick all the blankets off. Violently. All night.

So much space! Just for us!

Leftover Bilbo's pizza by the pond. Also a closeup of where he lost his unicorn horn.

I had been dreading going, to be honest. It seemed like it was going to be a big hassle just to give one little 15-minute talk for a line on a CV that no one was going to care about, but I’m glad I went. It felt more like a little vacation than a trip for work because it recharged parts of my brain that had gotten sluggish over the winter. I got new ideas for research and writing projects out of the discussion at the panel, plus new enthusiasm for working on them, thanks to some time spent talking shop with other academic-types. I hope it helps me build on that sweet spot, so that maybe someday the things I research inside and out and the things I care about will be the same things. That would be lovely.

On belonging

David and I have decided to officially join the church across the street. Depending on your background, this is either a huge commitment or an “oh, that’s nice” (I’ve done both types).

Our pastor has been very clear that our involvement in the church isn’t affected by our membership status. 

But we’re joining anyway.

We didn’t join the previous church we attended because we knew we were probably only going to be there for a few months. We would have happily stayed there for much longer if one of us had gotten a full-time job in Lafayette, but that didn’t happen. Still, we felt like we fit there. There was a sizable minority of people very like us—lots of academics, many of them in the “young adult” range (whatever that means), lots of people with similar life experiences and political views who had similar questions about faith and God, several of them also with babies around the same age as B. We made friends quickly, and if we had been able to stay longer, those friendships would have probably deepened easily. We had previously come from a church where, although we were members and had attended for almost ten years, we never felt quite like we belonged to the larger congregation (a feeling that grew progressively stronger the longer we were there and the more our beliefs evolved over those ten years, though we had a small group that we loved who I still miss), so fitting in like this was blissful.

When we knew we were moving, I scoured the internet for churches in the area like the one we had newly fallen in love with, but the closest church in that denomination was fifteen minutes away. This may not sound like much, but it’s become important to David and I that we worship in our community. When I was young, although my church was only five minutes away, I rarely went to school with any of the other kids there, first because they were in a different school district, then later because I was homeschooled or at a private school. It was hard to make connections with other kids when I only saw them in Sunday School or youth group while they saw each other every day. Much later, when David and I lived in Lafayette, we realized what a joy it was to be able to walk or ride bikes to church and to see friends from church around town every day (this is true, by the way, for both churches that we attended while we lived there).  

But then we bought a house here, and lo and behold, there was a church right across the street, in a denomination that I had only recently heard of but that I knew was “in full communion with” our second church in Lafayette. Tentatively, I began to investigate the website. My dissertation chair would call it “workmanlike”—it’s not pretty, but it gets the job done. I learned that there’s a quilting circle that’s been making quilts nonstop for something like six hundred years. The church’s history includes the date when they started having services in English instead of Swedish, and notes that many of the current members are descendants of the church’s founding families. The book club is reading something by Bill O’Reilly.

This all translates, by the way, to a congregation much older than us that is likely very very very set in their ways.

But I saw a picture of the pastor, who had only come to the church a few months earlier, and I thought, “Yeah. I’d like her to be my pastor.” So we decided to check it out.

I was right about the demographic. There were no babies except B. The pews were sparsely populated—my dad has taught Sunday School classes with a better turnout—and my little introverted self cringed at how INCREDIBLY CONSPICUOUS we were. It didn’t help that my kids are not at all in any way quiet. The two of them during prayer time made more noise than the entire congregation did during the singing (of songs I had never heard). Also they were having some kind of special Thing that day that involved everyone getting up and standing in a circle and holding candles. Eep.

Fortunately, the special Thing involved cake afterwards. And we talked to enough friendly people that I felt like we ought to give it another try the next week.

And then the next week.

And the next week.

And while we still didn’t “fit in,” I started to feel that maybe this was a place where we could belong. It’s an old church, and the village is older still, and the web of relationships is deep and intricate (there may or may not have been Game of Thrones jokes during a Sunday morning reading group) and incomprehensible to me, but what I can understand are the welcoming gestures inviting us to tie our own threads to the web wherever we can. Our next door neighbors, who Queen Mab adores (when she sees them pull in the driveway, she tries to sprint out the door to go greet them, and when they’re doing yardwork will follow them all over trying to help) are members, and the pastor are her family are in the parsonage next to the church. I see other members of the church at the library or at the cantina. Our house was built by early members of the church, and every family that has lived there since has attended there—we learn more about the house from talking to the neighbors and other church members than we ever learned from the realtor (who nevertheless is still the cousin of somebody we met the first Sunday we visited). Sunday School is the highlight of Mab’s week, and she will take off through the pews when it’s time to pass the peace to hug her friends and teacher and shake hands with all the grandparently types. Even B will try to climb the back of our pew to “shake-a hands!” with the people behind us.

Since I doubt we’ll ever “fit in,” in the sense of not being an obvious outlier, I’ve decided to just own my out-of-syncness. “I know you’ve introduced yourself to me and this is super awkward but I really can’t remember your name!” “Sorry, I don’t know how to pray like a Lutheran!” Years of attending conferences have trained me how to temporarily disable my introversion and actually talk to people for a little bit. It’s exhausting but rewarding. We joined the aforementioned reading group during Lent and went to all the midweek Lenten suppers, and now I’m on the education committee. We figure that if we’re going to belong, we’re going to have to make it happen. We’re not going to fall into community the way we did in the days when we made friends by sitting next to them in class and snarking our way through seminars.

And while this is an old church, and the pews are still less than half full most Sundays, and there are only three kids in Mab’s Sunday School class (and one of them is the pastor’s daughter), I believe in it.

They’re not one of the “cool” churches scrabbling for relevancy. Our pastor, who’s only a little less new to the area than us, is the first person to mark my forehead with ashes. The congregation has recently come through some major upheavals, and yet they’re still here, and they’re open to change. Because they know that to stagnate would be to close the church forever. Maybe if we had come here a couple years ago, it would have been different. I know there are still some people who are deeply unhappy with the new pastor and the new order of things who are currently keeping their heads down. A couple years ago they would likely have been much more influential, and maybe it would have made it harder for us to find a place here.

But we came now. That we were brought here at this particular time probably means something.

Most of them are not like us. Or we’re not like them. We’re not from the area, and we’re a couple generations younger than most of them. But they seem happy to have us, and I’m happy to be here.

So we’re joining. Because even if we don’t fit in, and even if it doesn’t affect the things we can or can’t do (or maybe because we don’t automatically fit in and it doesn’t affect our involvement), we want to say to the church, “Yes, we will stay and work with you and belong with you.” We don’t have to make the official commitment to be part of the church, but we’re doing it anyway.

(The day after we told the pastor we would join, I read this, which inspired this post)

My new art project

I had an "oh, duh...." parenting moment a couple weeks ago.

Queen Mab loves to write little notes to people. She'll scribble a little, draw a heart, and announce that it's a letter for Nana, or Daddy, or Auntie Kate (she's started pronouncing the "au" in Auntie like "ah," which is really delightful) So when I discovered while unpacking a bunch of little notepads left over from high school with my maiden name on them (I didn't write many notes back then!) I gave them to her.

Then Valentine's Day happened, and the deluge began.

There were little notes EVERYWHERE. Little hearts, little stars, little scribbles, piled up in the corners of the kitchen and the pantry and getting soggy on the bathroom floor. It was madness. I gathered fistfuls of them to recycle.

One day, though, she asked me if I would draw her a heart.

So I did, and I hung it in the entryway doors so she could see it as soon as she came home from school. She was ecstatic.

She liked it so much, in fact, that a week or so later as she and I spent a pleasant hour drawing together, I made her this.

Of course she loved it too.

But it wasn't until several weeks later that I realized, as I swept up still more little scribbled notes, that if this was how she was trying to communicate her love to us, maybe that's because this is what would make her feel loved. So I scribbled this down one day and stuck it in her lunchbox.

When she came home from school she was practically bouncing. She loved it! She told me how happy she was when her teacher read it to her!
...

Oh, right. She can't read yet (well, not well enough to read Mommy's scribbled notes, anyway).

So I started sending stuff like this instead.

A sauropod having a snack, Mab with her Nana and Papa, a Happy Thursday sunflower, and a tap-dancing Triceratops.

I like to think her behavior has improved since she's been getting these little notes. But even if it's not, it's still worth the effort, because I know she feels loved. Yesterday on the way home from school, she told me how much she liked the picture she'd gotten that day (the sauropod eating an apple) and said, "You're a really good artist, Mommy. I can tell you put a lot of effort into that."

If I hadn't been driving I would have hugged her. It was hilariously adorable to hear her saying back to me the same things I say to her about her artwork.

And Mab isn't the only one who's benefiting from this. It's hard parenting Mab sometimes. I think it's probably harder being Mab, though. The world is an intense place when you have big emotions, limited life experience, and everyone else is twice as big as you (except the toddler, who is the same size and always wants the exact thing you're holding/doing right at that moment). And when I spent a few minutes every day trying to think of what kind of little picture I can draw that will make her smile, I find myself seeing the world from her perspective. And when she's furious and exhausted and screaming and hitting, it's easier to pick her up and go sit someplace quiet with her until she's calm enough to talk to me, rather than scream back. 

I remember reading about an analysis of a bunch of studies on the efficacy of spanking children, which revealed that while spanking didn't actually improve the child's behavior (if anything, it had the opposite effect), it did make the parents think the behavior had improved. When I make these notes for Mab, I feel more connected to her, and that sense of connection helps me parent her more patiently. I lose my temper less, and so even if her behavior is the same, I feel better about it because I'm not losing control over the situation.

Even if her behavior hasn't improved, mine certainly has, and the end result is a happier, more peaceful Mab and Mommy.

The blog post is pretending to be about yoga but is secretly me working out some thoughts for my Kalamazoo paper

On my previous post about the word “awareness,” my friend Kate commented on my Facebook link that “I think in yoga-speak awareness is like mindfulness, not just knowing that something exists but paying attention to that thing, in this case, the sensations that yoga is producing in you, which seems ridiculous at the beginning but gets easier with time.”

Which made concrete (concretized?) something that I had a sense I should be doing but of course didn't really grasp and was not terribly good at. Yoga, once I didn’t have to dedicate all my effort to the plain old “what is this and how do I do it and is this really a good idea?” thinking, has ended up being the place where all my writing thoughts happen. Of course, even after this reminder I still think about writing while doing yoga because I haven’t really had the necessary time to practice yet. Also, I rationalize it by telling myself I’m thinking about writing about my body and yoga, so there’s that.

But pursuing this line of thought also sent me down some other bunny trails. I have a sense that paying attention to how my body feels when I stretch and push it isn’t entirely distinct from paying attention to and loving on the people and places that surround me. After all, paying that kind of attention to my body tends to lead to me loving it ("Oh, what a nice patient body you are! Thanks for trying to cooperate with me when you would rather not! Also, while we’re on the subject, you’ve done an awesome job with the whole carrying-babies, thing, not only on the inside but also in my arms and on my back. That’s hard work! I love you, body. High five."). I recently stumbled across a collection of essays that discusses that in a lot more detail (Yoga and Body Image ed. Melanie Klein and Anna Guest-Jelly, Llewellyn Publications, 2014), because everything I know I read in books. I’m a veritable Twilight Sparkle.

At any rate, my research tends to consider the ways in which our bodies themselves are not entirely distinct from our environment. Some people call that “posthumanism”—the idea that our bodies include/overlap/intersect with our transportation, our technology (David refers to his smartphone as his “brain extension device”) and so on. See Donna Harroway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto,” for example. But the delightfully controversial Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has argued in Medieval Identity Machines that this was actually a very common perspective for medieval authors as well. 

Take a look at the Zodiac Man, for example (go ahead and check Google Images for examples—I’ll wait. Cohen’s is from Biblioteque Nationale MS lat. 11229 fol. 45r, but there are many others). There’s a human body, but with arrows and lines shooting out of it connecting him to the stars. Medieval medicine (yes, that was a thing—also, they bathed. Let’s not have any of what C.S. Lewis termed chronological snobbery around these parts ;-) ) was very concerned with how the movements of the stars and planets affected the movement of the humors in the body. As Cohen takes readers through his examples in art and literature, medieval bodies reveal themselves as not just organs and skin and bones and muscles, but also stars and planets and continents and weapons and tools and (in the case of knights) horses and armor.

Which makes me wonder. If medieval monks had invented yoga, what would it look like? What if Margery Kempe or Julian of Norwich had been yoginis?

Awareness (and a garden update)

The word "awareness" bothers me. Most basically, it means that you know a thing exists, like having awareness that there may be traffic on the street, hopefully resulting in looking both ways. It's also developed a more nuanced meaning of being deliberately conscious of things like breast cancer and domestic violence and other social issues, though these calls for "awareness" mostly seem to stop with, "Hey! Thing exists!" (like those gimmicky bra color things on Facebook on Breast Cancer Awareness Day, which I loathe). I don't think anyone today isn't aware of the existence of cancer, or violence, or whatever. Calls for mere awareness seem grossly inadequate to the challenge.

So when the directions on a yoga website instructed me (paraphrasing because I don't remember exactly) "with every breath commit to greater awareness," I interpreted it as, "Blah blah blah buzzword blah." What am I supposed to be aware of? And why does it matter? But I tucked the idea that awareness is to be committed to someplace safe where it wouldn't get lost.

Today Glennon of Momastery posted on Facebook, "It's World Autism Awareness Day. To all the little ones with autism: we are not just aware of you, WE LOVE THE BLOODY HECK OUT OF YOU. We are not just aware of you, WE VALUE YOU and THE GIFTS that only YOU, JUST THE WAY YOU ARE, can offer our world."

Yes. Ok. Thank you. When someone tells me to be aware of Thing, I should read that instead as "LOVE THE BLOODY HECK OUT OF" everyone involved.

So I started thinking about the awareness that the skinny-stretchy-bendy yoga lady in the picture online told me to commit to. And I remembered gardening yesterday with Margaret. She was sent home from school on Tuesday with a low-grade fever, and being the responsible parent I am (forgetting that I'm the one who sent her to school when she obviously wasn't feeling like her usual self in the first place) I kept her home for a full 24 hours after her temperature was normal, which meant that on Wednesday, she was feeling fine and I wasn't going to let her spend all day watching Dinosaur Train.

We went outside and planted sunflowers, zucchinis, and a pumpkin.

They went here because no one wants to mow this area and the sooner it gets turned into a garden the better.

We checked on the little sprouts that I posted pictures of a few weeks ago. I'm thinking daffodils.

There were these little purple crocus things that seemed so fragile I couldn't imagine how they would ever survive in our yard, but here they were.

Also these. No idea what they are, but they're intriguing.

Later I took all the minions for an adventure in the field behind our house, sleeveless in the sunshine.

So. Awareness. Small things growing (both children and plants), sun on my back, birds singing (there's one that's been spending a suspicious amount of time in the neighbors' shrub--perhaps a nest?) and an intensely blue sky.

Every day I will commit to loving the heck out of it all. And believing that the heck is being loved out of me, too.

Rights, doing right, and Holy Week

I started writing this Wednesday night after my sister asked for a blog post, and I realized I hadn’t actually written much here lately, even though I feel like I’ve been writing all the time. But lately I’ve been using up all my writing mojo on academia-related things (job letters, a couple conference papers), which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Writing these materials has forced me to balance two necessary but opposing forces in my life right now—saying “no” to the things I don’t want, while also saying “yes” to the things I do. Deciding what I’m into, and what I’m not. I’ve thought a lot about what I don’t need or expect from this new chapter in my life, and that approach is necessary but by itself a dead end. So in many ways, it feels really good to write a cover letter, because it forces me to remember how awesome I am at teaching and research and to imagine what I do want from a job. Painting an image of myself as a teacher and scholar has been a shift away from this idea of “what am I not?” to “what am I?”

It’s easy for me to be negative about things—not in a pessimistic sense, in which everything is terrible, but in the sense that I have become adept at looking at something and realizing that it’s not for me. I look at the goals I had been pursuing earlier in my graduate studies—the idea that I would be a tenured professor at a research-oriented university with an office with bookshelves and a window and maybe some kind of potted plant—and think, “Maybe not.” I’ve spent a lot of energy on clearing out unhealthy assumptions and preconceived notions about my future, about Life, the Universe, and Everything. There are a lot of things I thought I wanted out of life that I’ve decided aren’t actually right for me, and even more things I thought I knew about God that I no longer believe.

In reference to God, there’s a word for that: apophatic theology. And having always believed that growing close to God was about learning more things about God, it’s been refreshing to realize that there’s a long tradition of doing the exact opposite—contemplating what God is not. And this approach to the attributes of God has, of course, much broader implications for how I relate to the world. I see churches that limit who gets to do what based on reproductive organs and businesses that try to discriminate against who they’ll serve based on religious differences, and I think, “That’s not of God.”

But like I said above, deciding what I don’t want, what I don’t believe, and what the world shouldn’t be like is only half the process.  

Last spring there were a bunch of blogs I quit reading, not because I disagreed with them, but because the bloggers in question spent almost every post writing about what was going on in the world and in the church that was wrong. And there’s a place for that. But it’s exhausting to only be fighting against, and not fighting for.

You can probably guess, having read this far, my general feelings on Indiana’s new RFRA. I don’t live in Indiana anymore, but in many ways, it’s still home. I’ve heard lots of chatter about what the RFRA does and doesn’t mean, and how it’s the same as, yet also dangerously different from, similar laws in other states (including my current state, which also has laws protecting people from discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity).

To be honest, I don’t know enough about the topic to issue a simple “this is wrong,” and I’m certainly not a Constitutional scholar (would I be more employable if I were, do you think?). But I think Fred Clark at Slacktivist (linked above) hit on what bothers me the most about this act—“the language of RFRA is being twisted to turn an attempt to defend the rights of religious minorities into a tool for defending the hegemony of religious majorities.” Especially considering that the religious majority that this law caters to is a tradition that worships a God who, while walking the earth in human form, had a reputation for partying with sinners, asserted that he did not come to be served but to serve and told his disciples that if they were compelled to cooperate with members of a pagan occupying army to not only cooperate, but to do exactly twice as much as required. 

This is Holy Week. I hope I don't need to remind anyone what God did this week. 

As Christians following our sacrificed God to the Cross this week, our focus should be what on how we can serve others, no matter who they are or what we think about them, and not on who we can avoid associating with. There’s a big difference between something being a right, and something being right.

So right now, rather than simply say “NO” to this so-called right, I want to find something right to which I can say “YES.”

If you live in Indiana, please support these businesses. (also see http://www.openforservice.org)